


Intermission

by a_mere_trifle



Series: Goodnight Sburb [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-07
Updated: 2013-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-23 23:59:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/627978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_mere_trifle/pseuds/a_mere_trifle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <b>-> Mother: Tell me about your past.</b>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intermission

\--

INTERMISSION

\--

**- > Mother: Tell me about your past.**

They weren't cruel people, but they weren't parents, either.

The poking and prodding stopped just about as soon as your memory began; they'd still take samples, once a month, as if anything might've changed in the interim, as if you'd become more or less explicable. You never had. You were enigmatic in how strange you were; more enigmatic in how normal.

You're not supposed to be normal, if you ride into the world in a quite literal blaze of fire.

That's one way in which you actually are what they'd expect. You're really not normal at all.

**- > Mother: Tell me about how you grew up.**

You can't raise a child in a laboratory. Scratch that; of course you can. You've done it yourself. It just isn't the best idea.

They tried to socialize you. It didn't really take. The kids didn't like you, and you didn't like them. Friendship is hard. Friendship is serious. Friendship wasn't worth it to you unless it was with someone special... and you'd probably just screw it up anyway.

Some of them were cruel to you. You were never cruel to them.

It wasn't their fault. You were just the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. You understood it even better than they did. And they knew it to their bones.

**- > Mother: Was there really never anyone?**

Of course there were. But you've long forgotten their names.

That's the thing about school-friends; the school does so much of the work for you. It brings you together-- keeps you together-- gives you things to talk about, things to do. Once you're out of school, or out of the same school-- that's all up to you.

Some of them you let go. Some of them left you.

It never seemed quite right, anyway. But the whole world felt like that.

**- > Mother: Why, then, the science?**

Science came easily to you. It fit with how you thought, how you felt. You passed the courses with ease, so of course you took them. There was a lot of work to do, and so few shortcuts-- you shudder to think what you might've done with some of the machinery you have now, in your youth. Leapfrogging over the basics isn't a good way to learn.

You could also spout some drivel about role models, imprinting like the mythical chick on the incessant doctors and nurses of your youth. Certainly it lent a sort of immediacy to the field of biology that the general public doesn't share. It wouldn't seem so important, to a lot of people. You knew better.

More than that... you wanted to understand yourself. No one knew where you'd come from. Everyone wants a history. You couldn't think of any other way to get at yours.

More than that... you wanted to understand the world. Something in it always felt wrong; something never seemed to add up. It looked perfectly normal, functioned just fine, but it felt like a post-apocalyptic wasteland to you, always, and it was the dissonance that drove you fucking nuts. You used to wonder if you'd have felt more at ease if you'd woken up in Mad Max. If you'd had some _reason_ to feel this way. 

But the world was fine. You never had a reason.

Maybe, just maybe, you thought, if you delved deep enough into the mysteries of creation, you'd figure out that something really had been _that wrong_ , the whole time.

It turned out you were right.

**- > Mother: And the wizards?**

Wizards _are_ scientists, done right. You think you read a book once, about that, there's an archetype of it made explicit in your head-- but damned if you've ever been able to find it again, no matter how you scour the childrens' bookshelves. But the theme's still there, in most of the examples. 

Wizards are about learning. Wizards are about gaining knowledge, and using it to change the world. To defeat your enemy, you must understand it. The right words, spoken correctly, can move mountains. Wizards are about learning the darkest secrets of the world-- and wizards are about using them.

So you could say just as well that you wanted to be a wizard, all along.

Call it inspiration, then. Rose would like them, you thought.

**- > Mother: And the liberal libations?**

It keeps it quiet.

**- > Mother: Keeps what quiet?**

There's a void at the heart of the world.

The world is an egg; and there are monsters slumbering inside.

The outside isn't much better.

**- > Mother: You could hear the Horrorterrors?**

Horrorterrors? Who cares about horrorterrors? Horrorterrors don't care about you. Horrorterrors are nothing, children scaring themselves with the threat of the unknown. 

The known is so much worse.

The almost-known is worst of all.

**- > Mother: The almost-known?**

You don't remember what you meant.

But you _know_ what you meant.

You don't remember why you feel this way, but you feel this way.

Things have happened. You're doomed. You've failed before you even started.

Sometimes the drinks stop you knowing. You can keep acting like the world matters. Believe that you're just being stupid, that all the world is what you see, and Fate is something lazy people cite when they don't want to take responsibility for their lives.

Sometimes, the drinks make you know more.

You put up the wizard statues when you were drunk. You named your baby in the midst of an epic bender. Popular wisdom would say those should be bad decisions.

But they still feel right.

**- > Mother: Tell me about when you found me.**

You'd begun to give up on it, actually, by then.

Searching for truth is hard. Intergalactic conspiracies tend to be stingy with their clues. It had begun to seem like a fool's errand... a vast excuse to explain away whatever had always been wrong with your heart. 

Scientific breakthroughs are largely a myth; but you don't get much more literal than a space rock out of nowhere.

Even before the DNA came in, you knew, _knew_ , the second you saw her violet eyes, that you weren't crazy, that you never had been.

And that-- the last thing you'd ever expected-- this child was _yours_.

**- > Mother: The last thing you'd ever expected?**

You'd figured it was the whole space meteor thing. The eyes were proof there was something fucked up with your genes. What the hell do you expect, of a kid found suspiciously near a metorite crater? Cosmic rays and all, mutations are to be expected.

You'd figured the definitive infertility came part and parcel with the space shit. But then-- there was the man in the hat.

**- > Mother: Mr. Egbert?**

You learned that eventually. You can research the shit out of things. 

He could've been adopted, of course. You've never found any records of it, though, and the first time you saw him, you thought, _he's hers._

You'd never seen the woman outside of photos in your life-- never got the chance to meet her. That was the day you'd finally decided to try.

So it was a colossal fuckup, of course. You're kind of cursed, that way.

At any rate, you're pretty sure that chick had a kid, so probably it was just a problem with you.

You wish you'd asked her. You might've learned something from her.

Or maybe you'd just have wrecked her life.

**- > Mother: Wrecked her life?**

She seemed happy. You can't really understand how, but she ran a joke shop and shit. She built herself a life. A normal life.

You're shit at normal life. You couldn't have entered into that without breaking it down around you.

So it was probably best you left her alone. She managed for herself just fine. 

There wasn't anything you could do. You knew that from the start.

**- > Mother: Anything you could do about what?**

It turned out the evidence you were looking for was everywhere. You just had to start dabbling in archaeology.

Well-- that got you to the technology, that and a particularly clever bit of real estate transaction. (There might have been bribery involved. It was so long ago.) A little dabbling in computer science got you the rest.

All right, even that's a simplification, because that's what enabled you to _do_ anything with what you found. You were closest the first time-- the key was history.

What the fuck is a strife specibus? A sylladex? When were they invented? How do they work? They've all got their origin stories, about as thin as those of superheroes. They work when you're a kid. Then you grow up, and if you haven't grown out of asking stupid questions by then (like you're supposed to-- one wonders why), you realize that they make no goddamn sense. The supporting documentation is thin on the ground-- there's no logical progression of ideas, no sense of evolution, very little sense of discoveries building on each other; it's more like they just appeared in someone's lap, someday, someone just clever enough to figure out how to pretend it had all been their idea.

That's exactly how it happened, you're pretty sure.

Research. That's why wizards are so attached to their tomes.

**- > Mother: But what did you find out, really?**

You found out what had happened.

You weren't the only kid on a meteor. That was one of the first things you'd found out. There were children who shouldn't exist, inventions that didn't make sense, ancient machines built from schematics no one could design yet.

You found out what was happening. It was all planned. You were all being placed, like chess pieces, in a world that was just a giant board.

You found out what was going to happen. The plans were slowly falling into place. The machines in your basement were counting down toward the end of the world.

You were all being played-- and it was the least surprising thing you'd ever heard.

**- > Mother: Then, what did you do about it?**

What can you do when you realize you're a piece in the middle of a game nobody will tell you the rules of?

Your options were rather limited. You'd learned enough to know that you weren't the target, here; you weren't the player. You felt like it should be; you felt very strongly that it was your responsibility.

But it was all going to be put on your daughter, and that was hard to come to terms with.

So you would prepare her, as best you could. And when the fire came down-- you would clear as much of the way as possible. 

You would find the architect of this and make them pay.

You don't really expect that to go well, though. In stories about children, parents tend to disappear.

**- > Mother: Prepare her how?**

She would have to become used to being alone.

She would have to be smart; smarter than a whip. She wouldn't need a wide circle of friends; she would need a few, and only a few, friends close enough to die for. The majority of people were going to die in the impacts. Having friends among them would only make it worse.

But she must be friends with those few. 

You also thought she needed a cat. You don't really remember why, but one morning you woke up with an epic hangover and a post-it note reading "hey lalonde keep the fucking cat okay" in front of your face. You've learned to trust that sort of instinct.

**- > Mother: Lalonde? You call yourself that?**

Only when you're pissed. In the angry sense, not the drunk sense, because occasionally you use other names and you're hardly ever not drunk.

Roxanne Elizabeth Lalonde, (Ph.D.). RE: Lalonde. REL. . Drrel. That last one doesn't work.

In re. Relations.

Fuck it, you're not the literary analyst.

**- > Mother: Relations...**

You were an awful mother.

**- > Mother: No, you weren't.**

You didn't know how it was done. You were too used to being aloof, too mindful of the coming apocalypse. Mostly you were a-- a drill instructor, preparing her for combat. Sometimes you tried to be motherly. You were shit at it, though.

You didn't know how to seem sincere about it. It all felt so orchestrated, so turned-around, so wrong. This wasn't who you were supposed to be. This wasn't how it was supposed to work.

She probably hated the stupid pony.

**- > Mother: I didn't hate the pony.**

She hated it, you could see it in her eyes. Too much? It was probably too much. You were trying to buy her affection and you knew it. You didn't know how to earn it any other way.

**- > Mother: You earned it by being yourself. It's not your fault I didn't understand.**

You never understood, you could never understand. That was always your flaw, you thought you understood it and you didn't, you never did, but you always thought, this time, this time I have it. This time I know everything.

You were always wrong.

She'll be better at it. She was always better at it. She has to be better at it.

You love her so much.

**- > Mother: I'm sorry.**

Sorry for so much. You don't even remember, it's just there, somewhere in the void. Maybe you shouldn't have tried to prepare her. Maybe it would be best to live like it was never going to happen. Maybe being happy was more important than surviving this. 

Maybe you were teaching her all the wrong things anyway.

**- > Mother: God damn this stupid fucking interface.**

Don't expect the machines to be useful. They were never built for us. They run on someone else's agenda, and if they ever seem to be working for you, that's when you should trust them least.

**- > Mother: It seems to work more on subliminal influence than I imagined. I didn't want that.**

You didn't want any of this for her. But it appeared to be her birthright, her inheritance, and it all felt like your fault.

**- > Mother: Stop drinking. It's okay. Really, it's all right.**

She was born into a world constructed for the sole purpose of ensuring she will never know what "all right" really is.

It can't be your fault. Why does it feel like your fault?

**- > Mother: Fuck.**

Heeheehee.

**- > Mother: Why didn't I ever just talk to you when I could?**

You were never an easy person to get along with. She seems to have inherited that from you. You don't trust anything about the world; why should she? You believe in universal conspiracies and grand plans; why should she think you're sincere? You're keeping things from her. You can't tell her any of the things that might help her to understand you.

You've got to change that. If it doesn't work. If it doesn't work, you have to do something different next time. Trying hard doesn't work, it never worked, you tried so hard... Can't drag anyone else into this.

**- > Mother: Why do you have to be alone?**

Maybe you don't. Maybe you have to learn you can't win. Maybe you have to learn for good this time that it's your job just to help the ones who can.

**- > Mother: This time? Next time?**

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

**- > Mother: Battlestar Galactica?**

Peter Pan. Peter Pan is a terrible story. Stupid little fuckers who won't grow up cause all the goddamn problems in the world.

Or you might just be jealous.

**- > Mother: We grew up rather too much.**

And yet never enough.

**- > Mother: I put so much energy into analyzing everything but you.**

Rose is such a good kid. You wish you knew how to tell her that.

**- > Mother: I love you, too.**

She's smarter than you. Maybe she'll figure it out, someday.

**- > Mother: I'm sorry. It's okay.**

She's smarter than you. She'll figure it all out.

**- > Mother: You look tired.**

Hammered is what you look like. But yes, blacking out. That undiscovered country from whose depths no traveler returns. That blessed silence. That void.

Nighty-night.

**- > Mother: Goodbye.**

\--


End file.
